This essay offers a defense of the concept of “relatability,” an
impulse in students we’ve long derided as unproductive and even ethically
suspect. In particular, it aims to sketch out a series of attempts to use
contemporary texts to disrupt students’ assumptions about their emotional and
psychological distance from Romantic-era fiction. Rather than dismissing talk of
readerly identification, I show how I have attempted to leverage my students’
desire to relate in order to launch a discussion of historical reading practices
and the emergence of relatability as a value.

Romantic Selfhood and the Selfie: Relating to the Novel

Stephanie Insley HershinowBaruch College, CUNY

Figure 1.
Kim Dong-Kyu, “When You See the Amazing Sight,” after “Wanderer Above
the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 (Nov. 5, 2013) Link

1. Any discussion of teaching the Romantic with the contemporary will necessarily
invite questions about the relative value accorded to each of the literary
historical periods being brought into relation. Are we introducing contemporary
texts (or debates or images) into our classrooms in order to “sell” Romanticism
(to make it appear more relevant; more interesting; more, in our
common-but-unfortunate parlance, “sexy”)? And is this type of appeal, arising
out of a well-intentioned attempt to maintain a space for Romanticism in our
curricula, misguided? (That is, are we merely reinforcing the secondary status
we’re attempting to correct for?) Will comparisons between contemporary and
Romantic texts always remain superficial? Does a presentist approach to pedagogy
depreciate the texts under study by undermining their historical specificity?
Might we, on the other hand, be giving the false impression that contemporary
phenomena are simply a given and only distant historical phenomena
are worthy of intensive analysis? I won’t be able to address all of these
questions here—not least because I don’t think I have all of the answers to
them—but these are the kinds of questions that inform the present essay.

2. I’ve been tempted to call my contribution to this special issue a defense of
“relatability”: a persistent pedagogical bugbear that has of late been
challenged, to widespread acclaim, in the popular press as well (see Mead and
Onion). The idea that literature should be “relatable,” critics argue, is
symptomatic of an epidemic of narcissism, evidence of a prevailing cultural
aversion to difference. The ubiquity of the selfie (casual but posed
self-portraiture, usually shared on social media) is often taken to be
emblematic of this millennial penchant for naval-gazing. While I remain
ambivalent about the term “relatability,” I have to admit that it’s true: I
am defending the impulse to relate as a far more complex and
generative response than these critics suggest. More importantly, though, I hope
to offer an argument toward using relatability, especially when
teaching the novel (the genre that has, since its emergence in
mid-eighteenth-century Britain, been seen as most susceptible to this sort of
response). The idea that literary texts (and, more precisely, literary
characters) ought to be relatable, ought to respond readily to the advances of
readerly identification, does, indeed, pose a pedagogical challenge. I, too,
want my students to think about the choices that go into crafting a character
and the implicit formal laws by which a character must abide, rather than simply
responding to that character as if it were fully human.

3. However, I think this impulse to connect (or to seek connection where it is found
lacking) also holds the potential to open up fruitful conversations in the
classroom about how we read now (and how they used to read back then). In
particular, I aim here to sketch out a series of attempts to use contemporary
texts to disrupt students’ assumptions about their emotional and psychological
distance from Romantic-era fiction. Rather than dismissing talk of readerly
identification, I have attempted to leverage my students’ desire to relate in
order to launch a discussion of historical reading practices and the emergence
of relatability as a value. To put it another way, I use my classroom as a site
for uncovering the prehistory of relatability. These conversations require both
careful historicizing and, at the same time, a willingness to remain limber
enough to move between kinds of texts, between kinds of attention, and between
points in time.

4. My current thoughts on these questions were prompted by an obstacle I encountered
while teaching a unit on sentimental reading in my Gothic novel course. My aim
in this series of class meetings was to help students connect the sentimental
novel to the Gothic as they completed Ann Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and took up Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). I provided them with background
on the culture of sensibility, and we read passages from eighteenth-century
letters describing the (for my students, peculiarly) physical response readers
had to novels like Clarissa (such as Sarah Fielding’s
Remarks on Clarissa [1749]: “Tears without Number
have I shed . . .”; or her brother Henry’s letter to Richardson: “I
then melt into Compassion, and find what is called an Effeminate Relief for my
Terror”). This background reading informed our discussion of Austen’s famous
defense of novel reading and, as I argued, its inextricability from an
understanding of novel reading as a shared experience. You’re no doubt familiar
with Austen’s digression:

if a rainy morning deprived [Catherine and
Isabella] of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in
defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.
Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt the ungenerous and impolitic custom so
common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the
very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining
with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such
works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine,
who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid
pages with disgust. (23)

I won’t rehash here the contours of a
discussion I’m sure many of my readers have led in their own classrooms, but I
will say that the discussion of Northanger Abbey in my
classroom tends to highlight the ways that novel reading as a practice is
experienced as both performed and shared—from Catherine and Isabella’s
relentlessly annoying, fashionable slang (“[A]re [the novels] all horrid, are
you sure they are all horrid?”) to the moment when Eleanor Tilney throws her
brother under the bus in Catherine’s presence, outing him as a selfish, solitary
reader: “I remember that you undertook to read [The Mysteries
of Udolpho] aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only
five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume
into the Hermitage-walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it”
(77). My students and I use these passages (and others) to think about the ways
that reading practices are both representative of cultural trends and, at the
same time, constitutive of character.

5. While this particular course had gone well up to this point, in this unit I found
it difficult to help my students consider the socio-historical specificity of
the culture of sensibility without dismissing out of hand the reading practices
we were discussing, most of which they found simply bizarre. My students, in a
rare united voice, expressed a knowing disdain for the reading practices of the
readers and protagonists of Gothic fiction. The complaint concentrated around a
claim about unbridgeable historical distance: people just aren’t like that these
days (and so, it followed, my students couldn’t be expected to understand these
aberrant historical creatures). It seems to me that the choice before me in this
kind of moment is between, on the one hand, taking advantage of that historical
distance and, on the other, mitigating it. In this particular instance, when
what I wanted my students to understand was precisely the collective experience
of immersive reading, I chose the latter.

6. Trying to find an analog for these intense—and shared—emotional experiences of
literary texts, I came to our next class armed with examples from our
contemporary culture: YouTube reaction videos.

7. In case you’re not familiar: these curious short films document a particular
viewer’s experience of a text (in some cases, a Twilight movie trailer or another fitting example of the
neo-Gothic), depicting moments of intense affective response alongside a running
narrative of that response provided for the benefit of the reader. Consider the
case of Nutty Madam, a devoted “Twi-hard” who posts short videos to discuss the
Twilight novels and to react to film trailers,
celebrity gossip, or book news. Nutty Madam shrieks, sobs, covers her mouth or
her eyes, bounces urgently in anticipation of a particular character’s
appearance on screen. She leans in closer to her webcam until her face floods
the screen, and then flings herself away from her computer, disappearing from
view entirely. She is utterly solitary (never joined by a fellow host) but also
affectionately chummy with her viewers, greeting them with an eager “Hiya!” and
joining the conversation in the (always lengthy, sometimes nasty) comment
threads below. She has, by virtue of her videos, become a minor celebrity; she
is invited to film premieres and tasked by various entertainment news outlets
with interviewing actors.

8. Invariably, the creators of these reaction videos fill their (and our) screens,
their legible facial expressions clearly the main event. In most cases, the
viewer does not actually see what the subject is seeing (though in rare cases an
inset image displays the clip that is being responded to). Often, however, the
videos assume prior knowledge of the clip being viewed by the subject. In other
words, the reaction of the subject is more entertaining if the viewer can, on
her own, anticipate and then call up the particular images that are eliciting a
corresponding response from the subject. In this way, the videos experiment with
a kind of asynchronous shared viewing experience, even as the subject draws
particular attention and the viewer sharing this experience remains unknown
(save for any supplementary interaction in the comments). This shared viewing is
complicated further by the fact that the clips to which subjects react are often
adaptations; this means that levels of familiarity with the shared text are
layered. When watching the reaction to a movie trailer, for example, a viewer
may be looking for both the response to the trailer which she has already seen
and, at the same time, the response to a depiction that deviates in some way
from a representation in the book both she and the subject have previously
read.

9. These videos, like the novels we discussed in class, triangulate the experience
of readerly interaction in a fascinating—if somewhat unsettling—way. Our
viewings led to a lively discussion about the physical performance of affect,
about both Romantic and contemporary fandoms (subcultures organized around
shared fascinations with a particular cultural phenomenon), and about why
certain characters might be more likely to provoke an intense response of
identification or revulsion (for more on Romantic fandom, see Eisner; on fandom
more broadly, see Jamison). This discussion also led to a serious consideration
of how gender expectations figure into our understanding of companionate reading
and performed emotion. My students, most of them women, traced some of their own
initial distaste to concerns about the performance of affect as the performance
of a certain kind of femininity (and, in particular, to a sense that to cry
publicly would mean exposing vulnerability). These concerns seemed to be
troubled, if not resolved, by the realization that the work of orchestrating and
then broadcasting public crying imbricates vulnerability with authority.

10. At my students’ prompting, we looked at other subgenres of reaction videos,
including those that documented responses to sports losses or victories (a
subject bursts into tears after a winning World Cup goal, the camera squarely
focused on his face to capture a live, real-time reaction) and the wildly
popular reaction videos showing viewers of the HBO series Game
of Thrones (a bar full of subjects scream in horror and peer through
their fingers when viewing a particularly grisly scene); many of these reaction
videos featured men exhibiting the same intense physical responses we’d already
seen (on Game of Thrones reaction videos, see Hudson).
Our discussion of gender became more complex as we built our network of examples
and then returned to the novel. (As if to provide additional fodder for this
unit, Stephenie Meyer has since published a gender-swapped “reimagining” of
Twilight, a reengagement with her own source
material that we might think of as a kind of self-reflexive fan fiction.)

11. I want to stress that the obstacle I encountered in teaching my students about
the culture of sentiment was not that students too eagerly invested themselves
in these characters and their lives. Rather (and, I think, typically), they
were, at first, quite sure that these texts were alien to them, to the point of
presumed unknowability. To help them explore their own reactions, I didn’t just
present them with evidence that these characters were in fact
relatable (by showing how those characters were like characters my
students expressed more comfort sympathizing with). Instead, we looked at
contemporary texts that tend also to seem strange or unknowable,
texts that may be familiar by virtue of their recognizable allusions or
reference points, but that, for many of my students, still inspired feelings of
unease or even disapproval. Indeed, I’m dubious of the idea that using
contemporary texts is only useful as a kind of incentive to coax students to
read texts about which they would otherwise voice reluctance (a carrot to lead
them ever further into the past). While many of my (in this case, mostly young
and female) students were still ready to hold the (again, mostly, though not
only, young and female) YouTube hosts in contempt, this response started to
break down over the course of our discussion, and started to become a curious
(but productive) blend of critical engagement and empathy. I know I’m far from
alone in making these kinds of connections. In a brilliant essay, “Our Bella,
Ourselves,” Sarah Blackwood has written of the resistance she met with when
teaching another late-eighteenth century sentimental novel, Charlotte Temple (1791): her students “complain that all Charlotte
does is swoon and cry. She isn’t ‘a strong heroine’ they protest.” Blackwood
likewise sees the Twilight Saga as a way to invigorate
often difficult class discussions: “to revitalize a number of our larger
conversations about feminism, especially those related to sex, pregnancy,
desire, and autonomy.” This investigation is possible not because her students
would rather talk about Twilight than Charlotte Temple, but because her students reject Twilight for the same reasons they reject Charlotte Temple. The juxtaposition helps them (and us) start to
think about why.

12. Building on our conversation about reaction videos, I also showed students this
caricature of two young women reading together in a vis-à-vis carriage. In doing
so, I quite pointedly wrested the image from its historical context. (The
caricature is poking fun at fashionability more than it is demonstrating
companionate reading.) One serendipitous visual effect is that the young ladies’
letters look (at least to me and to my students) startlingly like our modern
electronic devices; like passengers on the Subway, they aren’t, as the name of
their conveyance would otherwise suggest, “face-to-face” but staring down,
intent on their reading. The time warp of the image is immediately suggestive;
the figures in the image seem both of their time and alarmingly familiar. That
hunch, that stare are a part of our own muscle memory. This familiarizing effect
allows the image to raise questions about our own habits of media consumption:
Can immersion coexist with shared intimacy? When we stare at screens, do we
necessarily shut out those around us? And what of the intimacy we share with
those we encounter on the screen (or on the page)? A similar effect is produced
by the work of digital artist Kim Dong-Kyu, whose “When You See an Amazing
Sight”—featured at the beginning of this essay—wrenches perhaps the most clichéd
image of the Romantic sublime into a commentary on our modern tendency to
document rather than experience. The commentary, like the discussions I try to
have in my classes, raises questions about just how different our contemporary
phenomenology might be: was the Romantic sublime ever purely
experienced? Or are paintings like Friedrich’s (and, we might add, poems like
Shelley’s or essays like Burke’s) analogous at all to our Facebook posts? Was
the Claude glass an Instagram filter? What difference does the immediacy of
(iPhone) photography make to the registration of aesthetic experience? Can we
constantly document our lives and still “recollect in tranquility”? (I’m
reminded of my beloved high school English teacher’s story of her visit to
Tintern Abbey: She gasped upon seeing the abbey on her first trip outside of the
US, dropping her camera and breaking it beyond repair. In tears, she comforted
herself by repeating, “It’s what Wordsworth would have wanted. It’s what
Wordsworth would have wanted.”) As I hope these questions suggest, it’s crucial
for me to bring these texts into conversation with each other in order to
provoke a discussion of both the Romantic texts and the
contemporary phenomena. It’s all too easy to fall into what Ted Underwood has
called, in his valuable discussion of using pop lyrics in the classroom, “the
naïve assumption that popular culture is absorbed directly by the ears, and that
only high culture has to be mediated through the analytic intelligence” (12).
These discussions only work, in my experience, if my students and I are invested
together in examining our own practices along with those of the historical
figures we’re studying.

13. While I would contend that these kinds of metacritical discussions could be
valuable in a variety of classes, courses in Romantic fiction are uniquely
situated to explore the complexity of students’ responses to fictional
character. This is because, as Deidre Shauna Lynch has shown, “It is
romantic-period characters who first succeed in prompting their readers to
conceive of them as beings who take on lives of their own and who thereby escape
their social as well as their textual contexts” (8). Lynch makes clear that
Romantic fiction mobilized a complex response to literary character that can’t
simply be summed up with the term “identification” or “relatability”:

Identification, the modern term for what we do with characters
. . . . obscures the historical specificity, the relative novelty,
of our codes of reading. With the beginnings of the late eighteenth
century’s ‘affective revolution’ and the advent of new linkages between
novel reading, moral training, and self-culture, character reading was
reinvented as an occasion when readers found themselves and plumbed their
own interior resources of sensibility by plumbing characters’ hidden depths.
(10)

Lynch is certainly right to encourage us to develop more
specificity when exploring the historical dimensions of character in our
scholarship. At the same time, it’s clear that “identification” and
“relatability” are, however diluted, part of the legacy of this
Romantic revolution in the long history of reading. For that reason alone, it’s
worth reconsidering their role in our classrooms.

14. We take a risk when we assume that students are just trying to relate to
everything and are eliding differences along the way. So much of what I expose
my students to is unknown to them. Why rob them of what isn’t? Relatability, as
I see it, isn’t a way for them to dig out; it’s a way for them to get in. We can
all relate (sorry!) to Michael Warner’s characterization of his classroom:
“Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they
aren’t supposed to. They identify with characters” (13). But Warner’s argument
is that we can only figure out what we mean by “critical reading” if we allow
ourselves to consider it as always bound up in relation to its uncritical other.
I share with critics of relatability a frustration with inert critical
responses—the sort that shut down or close off analysis rather than encouraging
it. But I’m less convinced that “relatable” is more disposed to this kind of
danger than any other initial response to literary fiction. In fact, in my
experience, relatable (and, crucially, the kinds of probing questions that it
necessarily prompts) holds particular potential to compel students to trace
their responses back to their textual causes, to think through the intricacy of
their connections to Romantic texts. To scrub the term from our classrooms is to
foreclose serious discussions of the complex work that goes into (and has long
gone into) novel reading.